Vitalik’s vision was much too big to be constrained by another chain. He was thinking about creating a base layer for everything. A computer that could simultaneously live in all the nodes of an enormous global network, which would be able to process anything you threw at it, without downtime or interference, so developers could build whatever they

“government is bad because it’s a monopoly more than for any other reason. You can think of the world as a free market anarchy where all the land is legitimately owned by 193 landowners that allow you to live on the land under certain conditions.”

As with large corporations, to him, governments become “inefficient once they cross a certain size threshold.”

Another issue to address in peer-to-peer, pseudonymous systems was Sybil attacks. Just as coins can be replicated in a digital world, so can identities. This is a problem in a network of equal peers because an attacker could create a large number of pseudonymous identities to gain a disproportionately large influence.

In Ethereum, there are two types of accounts: externally owned accounts, controlled by people’s private keys and containing no code, and contract accounts, controlled by their code.

Peer-to-peer networks interconnect equally privileged nodes with each other, allowing users to share and transfer data without the need of a centralized administrative entity. Systems using this architecture are resilient against censorship, attacks, and manipulation. Just like the mythological Hydra, there’s no one head that you can cut off to kil

Developers learned the world can’t be crammed into smart contracts, and that smart contracts will only be as smart as the people who wrote them—and those who tried to break them for nefarious or hubristic reasons.

Nick Szabo, the cryptographer who in 1998 invented the digital currency “Bit Gold,” coined the term “smart contract” in the early 1990s. In a 1997 paper, he said smart contracts “combine protocols with user interfaces to formalize and secure relationships over computer networks.” The system eliminates the need to pay for and trust third parties lik

Researchers Cynthia Dwork and Moni Naor made the first break toward solving these problems when they invented the “proof-of-work” concept in 1993. Proof-of-work is aimed at deterring attacks or spam in a network by requiring the users of the service to do some work, so that it would be economically inviable to create useless or malicious data.